Education Research

An archive of research links and resources highlighting preschool,
kindergarten and child research studies, conducted by educational and
independent sources and how they relate to childhood development, family
cohesiveness and educational values.

The Los Angeles Times has produced a groundbreaking analysis of how effective Los Angeles Unified School District teachers have been at improving their students' performance on standardized tests.

The Times has decided to make the ratings available because they bear on the performance of public employees who provide an important service, and in the belief that parents and the public have a right to the information.

Darwin and Freud walk into a bar. Two alcoholic mice — a mother and her son — sit on two bar stools, lapping gin from two thimbles. The mother mouse looks up and says, “Hey, geniuses, tell me how my son got into this sorry state.”
“Bad inheritance,” says Darwin.
“Bad mothering,” says Freud.
For over a hundred years, those two views — nature or nurture, biology or psychology — offered opposing explanations for how behaviors develop and persist, not only within a single individual but across generations.

Traditional history suggests that dinosaurs and humans never crossed paths because their existence on earth was separated by tens of millions of years.

But a new discovery by scientist Mark Armitage of California State University may well turn the history of human civilization upside down. Armitage was recently on a dig in Montana when he came across the largest triceratops horn ever unearthed. Upon further examination of the unique specimen with a high-powered microscope Armitage discovered something that no scientist had ever seen on a dinosaur sample before - soft tissue. When he published his findings his colleagues were stunned, because the existence of soft tissue, which should degrade and disappear over millions of years, suggests that dinosaurs didn't go extinct 60 million years ago, but rather, were alive and well in North America just several thousand years ago.

A pair of Pentagon-funded hackers prove it]s possible to take control of your car with a few keystrokes. Time for Detroit to wake up.

Stomping on the brakes of a 3,500-pound Ford Escape that refuses to stop-or even slow down-produces a unique feeling of anxiety. In this case it also produces a deep groaning sound, like an angry water buffalo bellowing somewhere under the SUV's chassis. The more I pound the pedal, the louder the groan gets-along with the delighted cackling of the two hackers sitting behind me in the backseat. Luckily, all of this is happening at less than 5mph. So the Escape merely plows into a stand of 6-foot-high weeds growing in the abandoned parking lot of a South Bend, Ind. strip mall that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have chosen as the testing grounds for the day's experiments...

The geeks at MIT and Harvard were playing with photons when they somehow managed to get the particles to "clump together" to form a molecule. They say it behaves just like a lightsaber.

Gizmodo interviewed them: "The physics of what's happening is similar to what we see in the movies," said one of the researchers. Lasers helped discover a new form of matter that blows photons through a cloud of rubidium atoms. When more than one photon was sent through the cloud, the particles began to cling together and form a molecule.

Once again, a study from an organization that you would never accuse of being "gun-loving" or "right-wing" seems to disprove the myth that the availability of handguns increases murder rates. In fact, it doesn't.

The Harvard study attempts to answer the question of whether or not banning firearms would reduce murders and suicides. Researchers looked at crime data from several European countries and found that countries with HIGHER gun ownership often had LOWER murder rates. Russia, for example, enforces very strict gun control on its people, but its murder rate remains quite high. In fact, the murder rate in Russia is four times higher than in the "gun-ridden" United States, cites the study. "Homicide results suggest that where guns are scarce other weapons are substituted in killings." In other words, the elimination of guns does not eliminate murder, and in the case of gun-controlled Russia, murder rates are quite high.

At our local Weston A. Price chapter meeting last week, a woman named Becky came up to reintroduce herself. A while back she told me that the hospital she works for was now making flu shots mandatory, and she didn't know what to do.

She wanted to let me know how that all turned out - you'll be shocked! You'll be amazed at how well written this letter is and how well thought out Becky's arguments are. Here's Becky's letter to the higher-ups at the hospital...

Berkeley Lab researchers have found a 3D analogue of the cutting-edge 2D material graphene. It could revolutionize the high tech industry, bringing things like much faster, far more compact hard drives, and paving way for new electronic technologies.

Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have announced the discovery of a compound that can exist as a form of quantum matter known as the three-dimensional topological Dirac semi-metal (3DTDS). The research team supported by the DOE Office of Science and the National Science Foundation of China used sodium bismuthate to produce this novel state, the very existence of which had been proposed by theorists fairly recently. The discovery comes less than a decade after graphene, the thinnest and the strongest known stable material with amazing conductivity of electricity and heat was isolated by UK-based, Russian-born scientists, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov.

Parents who invest in toy computers and other electronic games marketed as boosting learning for babies and pre-schoolers could save their money and help their children to learn themselves, according to new research.

A government-funded study examining the role of technology in the lives of three- and four-year-old children and their families found that the hi=tech devices - one of the fastest growing sectors of the toy market, aimed at infants as young as nine months - are no more effective than traditional ways of introducing basic literacy and number skills.

The demand for greater levels of computational performance remains insatiable in the high performance computing (HPC) and technical computing industries, as researchers continue to seek out and solve the world's most challenging computational problems.

However, access to high-powered HPC systems has been a constant problem. Researchers must compete for supercomputing time at popular open labs like Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee. And, small and medium-size businesses, even large companies, cannot afford to constantly build out larger computing infrastructures for their engineers. Imagine the new discoveries that could happen if every researcher had access to an HPC system. Imagine how dramatically the quality and durability of products would improve if every engineer could simulate product designs 20, 50 or 100 more times.